Suicide by ingestion of 2,4-D: a case history demonstrating the prudence of using GC/MS as an investigative rather than a confirmatory tool.

Suicide by ingestion of herbicides or pesticides is not an uncommon occurrence. Several cases have been reported in recent years (1-14); in all of these cases the case history strongly suggested the specific material in question thus making the analytical work confirmatory in nature. There is a veritable dearth of reported cases of suicide involving the serendipitous discovery of a herbicide or a pesticide, as we were able to discover no such cases in recent years (1-14). We now report a case in which an unsuspected herbicide was detected as a result of using GC/MS as the screening tool for toxicological investigations. Conceivably a considerable number of poisonings by agents other than pharmaceuticals are being missed in investigation into mysterious human deaths or admissions to the emergency department of hospitals where this technique is used only to confirm the presence of poisons detected by a preliminary screen designed for pharmaceuticals.